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General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1904 Original Publisher: J. Long Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV My own destination was Trapolsk, a convict station in the far East, almost as remote from Western civilization as Okhotsk itself, though not quite ; but among our gang of unfortunates were many who had been convicted of less heinous crimes than my own, which, I had to remind myself occasionally, was murder, a crime punishable by a life sentence of hard labour in the mines. I was, I found, in the blackest list of convicts -- a murderer among other murderers, Nihilists, threateners of the Tsar and his agents, one actually an assassin of some minor official; but there were, as I have said, many whose delinquencies belonged to a minor scale of importance, and these were bound for agricultural penal stations, places where, for a certain number of years, they would be compelled to work in the fields like common rustic labourers, only with this difference, that they would be kept to their work by squads of soldiers, who, with lash or perhaps bayonet-point, would see to it that no man lagged in the performance of his task. These minor delinquents did not wear fetters, as we of the black list were obliged to do. I must honestly say that, having been accustomed, as I suppose all Englishmen are, to read the most horrible accounts of the cruelty and inhumanity meted out to Siberian convicts both en route and when arrived and at work in farm or mine, I was agreeably surprised by the actual state of affairs. I met with barbarity and ill-treatment from individuals certainly, especially from one brute of a soldier -- as to whom I shall have more to say -- but as a rule I was fa...